Sunday, December 12, 2010

Twenty Ten

This year has been insane... on all fronts. It's been a personal roller coaster of crazy life stuff. But I'm not going to bore you with all of the details.

This might be my last post of the year, so I thought I'd hit this one up as a bit of a trifecta.

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First off; I've been lucky enough to have been Lead Character designer for Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. Our first season finished airing earlier in the year and I couldn't be more ecstatic about it's reception.... I also can't believe that I'll be wrapping design on season 2 this week.

One of the coolest aspects of being part of Adventure Time has been working on the episode title cards. The cartoon title card has been one of my favorite traditions in animation and dates back to the earliest of cartoons. On Adventure Time we decided to try something a little different by trying to visually package each episode with something a bit more pulpy than the actual content of the show. It was definitely a struggle at times, but I think overall they turned out incredibly well. We didn't have much time worked into our day to day to handle the workload that these title cards demanded, but everyone involved really gave their all to make them as great as possible.

Many of them started as thumbnails or concepts by Pen or Pat and just as many were riffed off of exististing pulp art.

I was responsible for laying out 25 of the 26 title cards. Santino laid one out as well, and did a BG for another. They were then handed off to art director Nick Jennings and painted by Paul Linsley and returned for a final polish pass by Nick.

Here are some of my favorite contributions. This was a really fun illustration challenge for me and I had to really try to dive into some type design..... which I still need a lot of practice doing.

This was one of my final layouts for Season 1. This is clearly an homage to Frazetta's "Death Dealer" and was drawn just shortly after his passing. I had a blast with this one. Frazetta's work is boundless with inspiration.

Pen did an awesome thumbnail for this... and I had fun trying my "romantic comedy" type.

The final card for this turned out awesome. My "bed bath and beyond" type was removed... haha

I was really happy with this one. I think Tom Herpich helped me get the final composition nailed.

It's been a dream come true; I'm teaching Character Design at CalArts! I had my last official class of 1st semester this past Thursday. It was an awesome semester. I've learned so much about what's important to me as a Designer and I'm constantly amazed and inspired by my students. I have a long way to go to tighten up my curriculum, but I think everyone has responded really well first semester.

I would never be there teaching if it hadn't been for some awesome encouragement and well timed recommendations by two uber talented students, Kristen Campbell and MJ "Double Vision" Sandhee (..... go see a doctor dude).

My plan is to add something every month starting in January. To be totally honest, the idea of me trying to sell what I do for me, to people like you, is both completely ridiculous and terrifying. I'm excited to see how it goes.

So yeah.

Thanks for reading. And thanks for sticking with me through ever more infrequent blog posts.